Posts tagged Messaging

There is has been a lot of conversation recently on the “twittersphere” about feature carousels and how much we either love them or hate them. Personally I am pretty neutral, when done right, they can be a useful part of a companies web presence.

But what does it mean “Done Right?” In a recently informal study presented by Erik Runyon at http://weedygarden.net/2013/01/carousel-stats/ he presents an argument against using them because the majority of the clicks were for the first item on the ND.edu website:

Regarding “Static” Carousels:

“Approximately 1% of visitors click on a feature. There was a total of 28,928 clicks on features for this time period.”

This is 84% of the 1% for a Static Carousel. A static carousel? I guess this means that the visitor needs to click on the carousel to move it to the next item, and then click again and again. It’s fairly obvious to assume just based upon the number of interactions required that the first item will get clicked on the most and the others will not.

Regarding Auto-forwarding Carousels:

“This site averaged the highest number of clicks with 8.8% of homepage visitors clicking a feature.”

This is a huge difference in the number of visitors clicking on the features. By using an Auto-forwarding feature Carousel there was an 8.8x increase in click-through percentage. This is NOT an insignificant finding!

“Finally, I’d suggest that the subject matter can make a big difference.”

Of course it can, and it did in the data he presented.

Several of our clients have told us that their marketing groups are always fighting for the first slot in an auto-forwarding carousel. The subject matter for the first slots at ND.edu were sports related. Sports at Notre Dame University are very popular. Its kind of like having a link that says, “Click here to see Kate Upton Naked.” I bet a lot of people would click on that link.

The reason that users hate feature carousels is that they work. The human perceptual system is designed to automatically attenuate towards movement and change. Auto-forwarding Carousels grab attention away from what visitors are reading and towards the marketing message that your company is trying to present them with.

I’d like to see a study that uses a random order placement of the content in order to control for the order effect. My guess is that when this is done the second item will be the most selected. Why? Does Pavlov ring a bell? See http://wp.me/p27Bf1-1J

For me, one of the most annoying things about many web-based applications is that they do not give the information that I need when I need it. Did my action “take?” Did I “do it right?” In the 21st century “real-time” world users expect information presented to them that is timely, updated and accurate. In our multitasking, impatient, twitterverse, instant gratification culture not immediately providing the most up-to-date information could give a false indication that everything is fine, or even a false indication that something is wrong.

How many times have you sent something to a printer that didn’t print out? So you sent it again, and again. Finally you figure out that there was a paper-jam. You fix it. What happens? Unless you have admin access to the print queue you will have three copies of the document that you were printing. Had the printer queuing system been able to provide feedback that your first print job had failed, you might have been able to save at least a small branch of some poor tree (go green)!

Today’s users expect to see immediate feedback based upon their actions. When adding a new customer to an online database, they want to be certain that the customer has been added. Displaying a brief message in plain language such as, “Customer John Smith has been added to your list of preferred customers” may delight a person performing a data entry task. This would be much more effective than refreshing the list of customers and updating the “count” of records and hoping they notice it. I bet that this might also eliminate a lot of duplicate records.

There is pro-active feedback too. Users can be fairly tolerant of most any limitation including processing speed, or many other bad experiences, as long as you give them information in advance about what they are getting themselves into. A favorite example of mine took place a while ago while I was performing a Linux installation. Apparently my hard-drive needed to be reformatted into a Linux compatible structure and this process would take a l-o-n-g time. Instead of providing the standard progress indicator that slowly inched its way to completion, the interface popped up a window that said: “This process is going to take a long time, would you like to play Tetris?” and provided a link to launch a version of the game to keep me occupied while the formatting was being completed. I was a happy user no matter how long it took.

Don’t give too much feedback! Your application should provide appropriate messaging before or after your user completes any major step in your process. You can (and should) provide at least some (perhaps visual) immediate feedback at the field entry level, but need to make sure that you do not overwhelm your user. The bottom line is that an informed user is a happy user. Keep them in the loop and they will keep you in theirs.

Sites that you should visit

The Usability People
The Usability People are a consortium of Usability and User Experience (UX) professionals that provide User Experience (UX) consultation and testing services to clients across the globe.

UX Books on Amazon
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